We've already had Masterchef, Hell's Kitchen, The Restaurant, Fifteen, Ready, Steady, Cook and Gordon Ramsay's F Word. Now we have Michel Roux's Service (BBC2) and it took me a good 20 minutes of middle-England vowels and slightly apologetic good manners to realise that the doggedly Gallic star of The Restaurant was never going to appear. This was the programme's first big error. [See footnote.] Reality TV thrives on bullies, personalities prepared to humiliate the contestants. No one turns on The Apprentice to watch Alan Sugar give group hugs, but that's precisely Michel Roux Jr's style. He's exactly the kind of boss you would like in real life; the last you want to see on TV.

The more serious problem was the subject matter. I'm just about interested enough in food to give most cooking shows a whirl, but I really couldn't care less about restaurant service. I don't eat out in Michelin-starred restaurants and the kind of anonymous deference and attention to detail required of their waiting staff just seems hopelessly outdated. My meal isn't ruined if my knife and fork aren't at right angles to the table's edge or the waiter catches my eye while serving the food. As long as the waiter isn't surly and I get what I ordered within a reasonable period, I'm a happy bunny. So a reality show hellbent on turning eight carefully chosen hopefuls into the downstairs half of Upstairs Downstairs has limited appeal.

"There's a lot to learn," said Michel, as he talked his proteges through the next eight weeks of high-street eateries, polo matches, country house banquets and Parisian three-star restaurants. If there was, it wasn't immediately apparent. When all's said and done, polishing the cutlery, laying the table and cleaning the toilets all looked fairly straightforward, and after that it's a simple matter of learning the menu and serving the dishes. Acquiring the necessary finesse and obsequiousness for a posh restaurant might take years longer, but neither that nor the basics makes riveting viewing.

So while the programme adopted the well-tested format of building up character narratives – Nikkita, the insecure single mum, Ashley, the stroppy 20-year-old with an asbo and no job, etc – you couldn't escape the fact that it was all fairly boring. Even the big set-piece fell flat because, even by the suspended-disbelief standards of reality TV, it bore no resemblance to reality. You can't really imagine a restaurant chain allowing a bunch of untrained amateurs to ruin its reputation by serving the wrong food, kicking diners out early and having front of house strops, without warning everyone in advance and offering them a healthy discount. Yet that's what we were asked to believe was happening. It killed what little excitement there was stone dead. Which was a shame, because the contestants, along with Michel and his sidekick Fred, were all terribly nice people and I wish them well. I just don't want to follow their progress on TV.

What is it with chefs and fish? For most of the week we've had Hugh telling us stuff we already know about how beastly we are to fish and now up pops Arthur Potts Dawson in Arthur's Hell on High Water (Channel 4) to do much the same thing. At the beginning, Arthur tells us he wants to find out where his fish comes from. It turns out it comes from the sea so he trundles down to Cornwall where he finds, to his and nobody else's amazement, that the Cornish fishing industry is on its knees due to depleted fish stocks and quotas.

Unperturbed, Arthur signs on with trawler skipper Pete for a week and discovers fishing is tough work and the sea can get dangerously rough. At one point, speculating on a storm warning, Arthur said, "If I went out and didn't come back then I would never forgive myself ever", seemingly unaware of the profound implications this had for the existence of an afterlife. That might have been a programme worth watching.

Fishing usually makes great TV – I can take endless episodes of Deadliest Catch and Trawlermen – but what we got here was less Arthur's journey to the heart of fish darkness and more his insatiable desire to prove he wasn't a metropolitan wuss, and to win the respect of the hardened Cornish fishermen. Which he pretty much managed, so he at least left happy. But just as with Michel Roux & Co, this was a voyage of self-discovery I'd rather he had conducted without me.

• This article was amended on 13 January 2011. The original was predicated on the reviewer's (erroneous) belief that Michel Roux Sr was the doggedly Gallic star of The Restaurant – when that was another chef, Raymond Blanc. Michel Roux Jr, featured in this review, is, clearly, not the son of Raymond Blanc. A published correction is appearing in the Guardian newspaper.